Ten years next month. I want to write this one carefully because the last one of these — "On year seven," three Decembers ago — was the entry that I have re-read most. Year seven was the one where I asked what would happen if Wei left, or if I left, or if the studio simply continued. I wanted to know which of the answers were honest. Some of them, three years later, were not. I want to start with those.

What I did not predict

The first thing I did not predict is that 2033 would be the year Wei made more pieces than I did. The numbers, with two weeks of December left to go: Wei has knotted 73 pieces this year. I have knotted 61. It will end somewhere near 78 to 64. Wei's share crossed mine sometime in late October. I did not notice the day it happened. Neither of us mentioned it for two weeks. I think we were both waiting to see if it was a fluke. It was not.

I have not written this number anywhere in the journal until now, because it took me a month to know how I felt about it. The honest version is: I am relieved. Year seven I had written that mo and Wei were the studio's two hands, equal weight. Year ten the weight has shifted, and the shift is the studio working correctly. An apprentice who does not eventually make more than the master is one of two things — she has not been given enough room, or she did not have it in her. Neither is what we wanted. Wei has had the room. She has had it in her. I will write 60-something pieces a year for as long as my hands work. Wei will write more.

The second thing I did not predict is that the named language would come from outside the studio. In year seven I wrote that the studio's discipline was that we name our work plainly. What I did not see was how much of the naming would, by year ten, be done by the wearers. Caitlin in Glasgow gave us "a piece that does not announce itself." Sigrún in Reykjavík gave us, by example, the principle that the piece is the size the letter is. Ailsa in Edinburgh, with two sentences, gave us "the piece needs to be itself for a while before I make it mine," which became the principle behind inheriting work. Three of the studio's most-used phrases were authored by people who had not made a piece. I find this the most quietly important thing about year ten: the language has gotten ahead of us. It is the wearers' language now.

The third thing I did not predict is that Wei would name a method that mo had been doing without naming — the seven-sentences method — and that, within two years, both of us would be using Wei's name for it as if it had always been the studio's term. I wrote the December 2031 entry naming it, but the practice was already Wei's. The studio's vocabulary has been authored, in the largest single share, by Wei. I want that on the record.

What I did predict that came true

In year seven I wrote that the studio would not scale. We have not scaled. We finished 2033 with 137 pieces, which puts the ten-year total at 1,047 pieces. Year seven I projected 800 by year ten if the studio held its pace. We are 30 percent over that, almost entirely because of Wei's increasing output and one quiet year of small pieces in 2032 that we did not expect. We have not added a third maker. The 2027 conversation about whether to do that — I wrote about it in "On apprentices" — is resolved by the simple fact that we do not need to.

In year seven I wrote that I wanted the archive to outlive me. The archive is now in three places at once — the paper card in the small wooden drawer beside Wei's bench, the working file I update daily, and the prepaid cloud archive contracted to 2075. The heritage page spells out the structure. The first card with two lines on it is #073 — Mary, who died in May, and her granddaughter Ailsa, who inherited the piece in September. That card existed, in my head, in 2026. It now exists physically. The slow proof of the right kind of structure is that it survives a death. #073 has.

In year seven I wrote that I would not commercialize the brand voice. I have not. We have turned down three book offers, one feature film consultancy, one cosmetics partnership, two AI-personality-licensing requests (the most recent of which would have used my journal voice to train a chatbot for a wellness brand), and a quiet approach from a luxury group whose name I will not write. The studio is the studio. I am still mo.

The named language, ten years in

I want to list, plainly, what the studio and the wearers have collectively named between 2024 and now. There are fifteen named terms on the vocabulary page. They divide into five categories:

Of those fifteen: mo authored five, Wei authored four, wearers authored three (Caitlin, Sigrún, Ailsa), and three were authored jointly between mo and Wei. The studio's language, as a corpus, is no longer mostly the founder's. That is the right ratio for year ten.

What I want to say about AI

I will write this once, plainly, because it bears writing once.

The studio has been using AI since 2025 — a thread that runs through the wearer's journey from discovery to design to wear to restoration. The thread is described on a dedicated page. What I want to say in this retrospective is the part the thread page does not say in so many words: AI did not change what the studio is. It changed how many people could find their way to it.

The studio in 2024 was 38 pieces, almost all to people who had heard about it from another person. The studio in 2033 is 137 pieces, of which roughly forty percent were started by a wearer's conversation with the AI helper before any of us read their letter. The AI does not make the piece. The AI does not review the piece. The AI does not photograph it. The AI does not write the reply letter. mo and Wei do all of that, by hand, as we did in 2024. What the AI does is help the wearer find the question. That is the work that, in 2024, we did slowly through correspondence and that, in 2033, the wearer can do at three in the morning if she cannot sleep. She still writes to us afterward. We still read every letter.

This is, I think, the honest version of how a small studio can use the largest tool of the decade without losing what made it small. The tool can sit at the front. The hands stay where they have always been.

The next ten years

I do not want to predict too much. I will write down what I expect, and a future entry can grade me.

I expect Wei to make seventy-five percent of the studio's pieces by 2038. I expect the studio to make its 2,500th piece sometime in 2042. I expect the first piece returned to us by a great-grandchild — a fourth-generation inheritance — to arrive in the early 2050s; this is the structural test for the archive, and it is the one I most want to be alive for.

I expect three things to be the same in 2043 as they are now: the east-facing window in the studio in Wenchang; the cream linen square on the bench; the rule that mo or Wei has personally touched every piece that ships. If those three are not still true, the studio in 2043 will not be the studio.

I do not expect a third maker before 2040. After that, I do not know. Wei does not know either. We will write the entry when it happens.

One last thing

Piece #1000 is on Wei's bench this week. The wearer is in São Paulo. Her name is Lia — the same Lia, now twenty-one, who Beatriz commissioned for in 2031 when Lia was nineteen and had never met Olga. Lia wrote to us herself this year. She wanted a piece for her twenty-first birthday. She asked specifically for Wei.

The piece will ship on December 28. The wearer will receive it in early January. Piece #1000 of the studio's first ten years is Wei's, made for a wearer who first found us through a piece Wei made. I did not orchestrate this. The numbers and the wearers worked it out themselves. I think that is what the journal has been about, more than anything: noticing how the work, given a long enough horizon, writes its own structure.

Wei will write the first entry of year eleven, in March. I will write again in June.

Thank you for reading, this year and the years before. The next ten will be quieter on the surface than the first ten — there will be fewer "first" entries, fewer named-for-the-first-time categories. There will be more pieces. There will be a card in the wooden drawer for each of them. That is what the studio is for.